Division of international labor comparisons
BLS logo
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| Abbreviation | ILC |
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| Formation | 1961 |
| Type | Government |
| Purpose | Comparable statistics across countries |
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Parent organization
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Bureau of Labor Statistics |
| Affiliations | U.S. Department of Labor |
| Website | http://www.bls.gov/ilc/ |
The International Labor Comparisons Program (ILC) of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) adjusts economic statistics (with an emphasis on labor statistics) to a common conceptual framework in order to make data comparable across countries. Its data can be used to evaluate the economic performance of one country relative to that of other countries and to assess international competitiveness.
Since 2014, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has discontinued this program, but The Conference Board continues to publish the majority of the data series.
The first commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Carroll Wright, began the BLS tradition of international comparisons. He sent members of his staff to Europe to collect information on foreign labor force trends. In 1898, BLS published a report that compared wages in the United States to those in Europe and in 1902 it published a report that described labor conditions in Mexico.
In 1915, the first issue of the Monthly Labor Review, the Bureau’s research journal, contained articles on employment and various other economic indicators in foreign countries. In the late 1940s, BLS assisted in the implementation of the Marshall Plan by developing international comparisons of labor productivity and providing technical assistance to European governments for developing their own productivity statistics.
BLS formed the current international comparisons program in the 1960s as the importance of foreign trade and interest in international competition grew. The first study published by the program was an evaluation of the comparability of unemployment rates undertaken in response to a 1961 request by the Committee to Appraise Employment and Unemployment Statistics. In 1963, the program began to publish trends of labor productivity and unit labor costs for the manufacturing sector. In the mid-1970s, the program published level comparisons of Gross Domestic Product per Capita and by 1980 levels of hourly compensation (wages and benefits) in the manufacturing sector.
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